Philadelphia Schools Are Going the Way of Detroit's

So what if anything is being done to stop it? Since most people don't even know about it, nothing can be done until the scheme is made public:

Philadelphia is about to take a fateful step. Thomas Knudsen, the recently retired chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Gas Works and now temporary CEO of the school system, has released a plan that will lead to the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia. The plan, or "blueprint," was written by a business strategy organization called Boston Consulting; it recommends the closing of 40 of the city's 249 schools in the coming year, with additional school closings in the years to come. The goal is to have a school district where the central district is phased out and a large portion of the students are enrolled in privately managed charter schools.

The most comprehensive (and alarming) account of the disestablishment of public education in Philadelphia is Daniel Denvir's article "Who's Killing Philly Public Schools?" As Denvir concludes, "If Knudsen's proposal goes through, the country's eighth-largest school district, in its fifth-largest city, will no longer exist in any meaningful sense. And neither will any remaining pretense that America offers everyone, regardless of race or class, an equal shot.

Where are the lawsuits from civil rights organizations? Why are they falling down on the job?

Diane Ravitch and others try to sound the alarm, but it appears to be to no avail. These privatization attempts are nothing more than a wholesale assault on democracy.